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Parents, grandparents and other adults told me that marijuana use could kill me — the same advice that many young people heard.

My middle school health courses equated marijuana with crack, PCP and cocaine as hard street drugs. I appreciate that it was a scare tactic, but if that caution was truly warranted I also deserved similar warnings about the dangers of processed food, soda or prescription drugs.

In college, I did my research and quickly found out the truth: marijuana is no more dangerous, and in some cases less dangerous, than most of the other things we put into our bodies.

Despite this disparity, marijuana remains illegal in most states and its use is still taboo. It’s time to make a change toward legalizing this drug, and there are three big reasons why.

1. If alcohol and cigarettes are legal, marijuana should be too.

Legal consistency is important. I can buy huge amounts of vodka or menthol cigarettes nearly anywhere in the U.S., and we can attribute thousands of lost lives to those products, but I have to visit Washington or Colorado to legally purchase a joint, which is a far safer pleasure. The strength of regulation we apply to our actions has to be proportionate to their danger.

According to the CDC, alcohol overdose alone caused nearly 25,000 deaths in 2013 and contributed to nearly 16,000 deaths from liver disease. Alcohol­-related crimes resulted in 2.2 million arrests in 2012. Cigarettes are just as bad, causing nearly 500,000 deaths in the United States per year with medical bills approaching $140 billion per year. Unhealthy foods are the worst of all, with latest statistics demonstrating that obesity is related to the deaths of nearly 20 percent of Americans per year, and that health care costs associated with being overweight are as much as $200 billion per year in the United States.

Try and regulate any of those and you’ll face serious backlash. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg saw a storm of criticism when he attempted to institute measures to curb the consumption of junk food.

2. Marijuana shows promise for good medicine.

After my third football-­related knee surgery, doctors diagnosed me with arthritis at 24 years old. They treated my pain and swelling with Vioxx, Indocin and Toradol. In the years that followed, I learned that these prescription drugs took a toll on my liver and other organs and that I should have avoided using them (and the makers of Vioxx have since withdrawn this drug from the market).

This knowledge was too little, too late when I already had years of daily prescription use under my belt during my five-­year NFL career. But if I had used marijuana medicinally, which shows promise in treating arthritis and bears minimal chance of organ damage, the NFL would have fined me and I could have faced prosecution — a risk that an estimated 50 percent of NFL players run each season because they accept the legitimate medical and recreational uses of the drug.

Even beyond sports medicine, users report that marijuana has a host of health-­related advantages. It stops pain, mitigates multiple sclerosis and Tourette Syndrome symptoms, and may reduce dystonia, among other beneficial effects. But state legislatures haven’t wised up to the potential treatment they deny their citizens while marijuana use remains criminal. In the U.S., we arrest people all the time for marijuana offenses — over 12 million of them since 1980.

It’s well past time to get with the program. Even Super Bowl­-winning Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll recently suggested the NFL should consider medicinal marijuana as a legitimate treatment for the injuries its players sustain.

3. Money matters, as usual.

Legalizing marijuana can make sense from a fiscal standpoint, too. Colorado was the first state to legalize and regulate recreational use of marijuana, and decriminalization has been a success for the state’s tax base. Colorado collected more than $6 million in tax revenue in the first two months of 2014, and state legislators expect the value to multiply substantially by the middle of 2015. This projection has led to a planned marijuana money earmark of $40 million for the state's public schools.

Washington appears just as well off, as it estimates that the state will raise nearly $200 million over the next four years in marijuana taxes and fees.

This means states that lag behind in the land of criminal marijuana are potentially denying themselves access to an opportunity that could lead to balanced budgets.

On a related note, legalization could not only represent a potential tax windfall, but also a chance to relieve the immense burden that our country faces when managing its prison systems.

Since the start of the decade, our prisons have incarcerated nearly 12,000 federal prisoners and about 33,000 state prisoners for marijuana-­related crimes.The average cost of each federal prisoner was about $29,000 in 2011 and every state prisoner cost taxpayers $31,286 as of 2010.

Our prisons are already overcrowded and underfunded, so it is irresponsible to continue imprisoning otherwise law­abiding citizens and contributing to an already difficult penal problem over something as minimal in consequence as pot distribution or use.

I’m not saying marijuana should be unregulated. Studies still point to marijuana having potentially harmful effects on teens’ and young adults’ brains, up to and including development of schizophrenia, and we should remain cautious until the dangers are more clear.

Legalizing marijuana across the country would mean enforcing appropriate age restrictions and consumption limits, just as states enforce regulations for alcohol and cigarettes — moderation is as important when using pot as it is for anything else — but ending the prohibition on marijuana use has been a long time coming.

Jack Brewer is CEO of The Brewer Group, a diversified global advisory firm. He is a former NFL player, received a master's degree in sports management from the University of Minnesota, and completed executive business programs at Harvard Business School and The Wharton School of Business. He is the senior advisor to President Joyce Banda of Malawi and founder of The Jack Brewer Foundation. He is an expert in sports finance and global economic development, and a regular CNBC contributor.